Comparing the Anthology: Themes & Exam Technique
The Anthology as a Whole
The AQA Telling Tales anthology brings together seven short stories from a range of authors, settings, and periods. Rather than sharing a single subject, they are connected by recurring themes — large questions about human experience that each author approaches differently. Learning to see these connections is the most important preparation you can do for the Modern Texts question, because AQA names one story in the question and then asks you to write about that story 'and one other story from Telling Tales' that you choose yourself.
The seven stories are: 'Chemistry' by Graham Swift; 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' by D.H. Lawrence; 'My Polish Teacher's Tie' by Helen Dunmore; 'Korea' by John McGahern; 'A Family Supper' by Kazuo Ishiguro; 'Invisible Mass of the Back Row' by Claudette Williams; and 'The Darkness Out There' by Penelope Lively. Each brings a distinct voice, cultural context, and formal approach — yet taken together, they constitute a sustained meditation on the same set of human concerns.
The five dominant recurring themes across the anthology are: family and relationships; death and mortality; secrets, revelation, and concealment; injustice and powerlessness; and appearance versus reality. Most stories engage with more than one of these simultaneously — which gives you flexibility in planning your essay.
Recurring Theme 1 — Family and Relationships
Family is the anthology's most pervasive subject. In Chemistry (Graham Swift), a boy, his mother, and his grandfather form a fragile domestic triangle disrupted by the arrival of Ralph, the mother's new partner. The story explores loyalty, grief, and the damage done to family bonds by an outsider. In A Family Supper (Ishiguro), a son returns to his father after years of living abroad, and the two circle each other across a cultural and generational divide that words never quite bridge. In Korea (McGahern), a son overhears his father costing out the money the American army would pay if he were drafted and killed — and the bond between them never recovers. The family bond is present in form but fractured in substance, held together by proximity rather than understanding.
What connects these stories is the idea that family is both the source of our deepest securities and the origin of our most significant losses. None of the anthology's families is untroubled; most are defined by what cannot be said, what has been lost, or what has been betrayed. This makes 'family' an ideal theme for an essay that explores different authors' contrasting approaches.
Primary stories for a 'family' essay: Chemistry (the fragile grandfather-mother-son triangle), A Family Supper (the father-son gap across tradition and modernity), and Korea (a son and father whose shared silences expose the damage done by war and emotional withdrawal). Secondary stories that could add nuance: The Darkness Out There (the Good Neighbours group as a substitute community) and Invisible Mass of the Back Row (the classroom as a failed parental space — authority without care).
The AQA question will ask how the anthology 'presents' a theme — so your job is not just to say 'this story is about family' but to analyse how each author uses form, structure, and language to construct their particular vision of family. Swift uses a child's limited perspective; Ishiguro uses deliberate ambiguity; McGahern uses sparse, understated prose to render the gap between father and son almost wordless.
Recurring Theme 2 — Death, Mortality, and Loss
Death is present in nearly every story. In Chemistry, the grandfather's death is the event around which the story turns — he drinks prussic acid from his chemistry shed, and the narrator must make sense of this loss alongside the loss of the family's pre-Ralph stability. In A Family Supper, death pervades: the mother's fatal meal, Watanabe's murder-suicide, and the implied threat of the supper's fish. In The Darkness Out There, the German airman's death at Mrs Rutter's hands represents a moral failure that has never been processed — the past's cruelty surfacing in the comfortable present.
What distinguishes the anthology's treatment of death is that it is rarely presented as a clean ending — it is an ongoing presence, shaping the living. The grandfather's death in Chemistry is anticipated and then replayed in the narrator's memory. In A Family Supper, the possibility of further death is held open at the story's end. These stories suggest that mortality is not an event but a persistent shadow cast over the relationships and decisions of those who remain.
For a 'death' theme: Chemistry (death as the event that fractures family — anticipated, then mourned); A Family Supper (death as cultural code — honour, shame, and the ambiguity of intention); The Darkness Out There (death as a moral failure from the past that contaminates the present). Each author's approach to death reflects their wider concerns about family, culture, and human nature.
Recurring Theme 3 — Injustice, Power, and Voicelessness
Invisible Mass of the Back Row is the anthology's most explicit treatment of injustice — Hortense is struck with a ruler for asking why Columbus came to the Caribbean, within a colonial system that wants its story repeated and not examined. But injustice takes other forms across the anthology. In My Polish Teacher's Tie (Dunmore), Carla — a school dinner lady of Polish heritage — is made to feel invisible and lesser by the professional hierarchy around her. The injustice is quieter than Williams's colonial punishment but equally structural: Carla's identity, culture, and worth go unseen within an institution that judges by role and accent.
The theme of voicelessness connects these stories: the injustice in each case is sustained by the victim's inability to be heard, believed, or understood. Powerlessness is structural, not accidental. Williams's narrator is silenced by the colonial classroom's authority; Carla in My Polish Teacher's Tie is silenced by professional hierarchy and cultural condescension; and the narrator of Korea is silenced by his father's emotional withdrawal — unable to confront the man who shaped his world.
Recurring Theme 4 — Appearance Versus Reality and Secrets
The Darkness Out There is the anthology's sharpest treatment of the gap between appearance and reality — Mrs Rutter's cosy exterior concealing her wartime cruelty. But the theme runs across the anthology. In A Family Supper, the surface of the family meal conceals an unknown — and possibly lethal — intention. In Chemistry, the surface stability of the grandfather-mother-son household conceals grief, resentment, and the coming displacement. In My Polish Teacher's Tie, Carla's cheerful compliance at work conceals from her colleagues the depth of her Polish cultural identity — what is visible on the surface (a dinner lady) is only a fraction of who she actually is.
What is significant is that secrets in this anthology are often not deliberately kept — they are the product of limited self-knowledge, cultural codes that prevent openness, or power structures that prevent the voiceless from naming what is happening to them. This makes secrecy a more complex theme than simple deception: these are stories about what people cannot say, not just what they choose to hide. Use the term dramatic irony to describe moments where the reader understands what a character cannot.
Several stories explore gender expectations and coming of age. In The Darkness Out There, Sandra's awakening involves not only a moral revelation but a revision of her gender and class prejudices. In My Polish Teacher's Tie, Carla's identity is divided: she is seen only as a dinner lady by her colleagues, yet privately she maintains a connection to her Polish heritage that they never know about. When she meets Stefan, she must decide whether to claim her full identity or remain invisible within institutional expectations. In Korea, the narrator's coming-of-age involves recognising his father's limitations — the war-hardened man who speaks of sending his son abroad is not the protective figure a child might imagine.
For an essay on 'coming of age' or 'loss of innocence', the most productive groupings are: The Darkness Out There (Sandra's moral awakening), Korea (a son's loss of faith in his father after an overheard conversation), and Chemistry (a child's loss of the family world he knew before Ralph). Each represents a different kind of growing up: moral, familial, and emotional.
AQA Exam Approach — The 30+4 Essay
the Modern Texts section gives you two Telling Tales questions and you answer one. Each names a story and a theme and asks how writers present that theme in that story 'and in one other story from Telling Tales', so you write about exactly two stories — one chosen for you, one chosen by you. The essay is worth 30 marks plus 4 marks for SPaG. You have approximately 45 minutes. The exam is closed-book: you must recall details from the stories from memory — no anthology is provided.
Your essay must address AO1 (a clear, argued response using relevant evidence from the stories), AO2 (analysis of language, form, and structure — how the author achieves their effects), and AO3 (context — relevant biographical, historical, or cultural information linked to the text). To reach the top band, all three must be woven together, not kept in separate paragraphs. Plan your essay around a thematic argument, not a story-by-story summary.